Weighted Regret-Based Likelihood: A New Approach to Describing Uncertainty

Abstract

Recently, Halpern and Leung suggested representing uncertainty by a set of weighted probability measures, and suggested a way of making decisions based on this representation of uncertainty: maximizing weighted regret. Their paper does not answer an apparently simpler question: what it means, according to this representation of uncertainty, for an event E to be more likely than an event E'. In this paper, a notion of comparative likelihood when uncertainty is represented by a set of weighted probability measures is defined. It generalizes the ordering defined by probability (and by lower probability) in a natural way; a generalization of upper probability can also be defined. A complete axiomatic characterization of this notion of regret-based likelihood is given.